THE FIRST test of the world's largest science experiment has been a resounding success as controllers sent a beam of atomic particles racing around the new atom smasher at Cern under the French-Swiss border.
At 9.28am Irish time yesterday, staff in the Cern control room watched intently, then cheered as monitors showed that a cluster of protons had completed three complete laps of the 27km-long, ring-shaped beam channel. The €4.2 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had finally sprung to life, heralding what experts say is the beginning of 15 to 20 years of scientific discovery.
"It's a fantastic moment," LHC project leader Dr Lyn Evans said yesterday. "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe."
The LHC is designed to send two particle beams circulating in opposite directions at almost the speed of light before colliding them and recording the results. These collisions reveal information about the sub-atomic structure of matter, but also help researchers to understand the origins of the universe. Yesterday's historic event represents the last of a small number of milestones that must be passed before the LHC can start to smash particles.
Yesterday's achievement cleared two of these. Controllers sent a bunch of particles hurtling around the ring to complete three laps in a clockwise direction. Then at about 2pm, a beam was sent anti-clockwise through the LHC.
"Getting two beams is a phenomenal accomplishment. The atmosphere here is just electric," Cern's head of communications James Gilles said yesterday.
The next step will be to send a beam around the channel for thousands of circuits, the prelude to establishing a sustained circulating beam, first clockwise and then anti-clockwise to test the systems, explained Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool. At full speed, the particles will complete 11,400 laps per second.
"We were only expecting to see the full circuit of the first clockwise beam today and by early afternoon we had seen two successful beams at full circuit. We now need to look ahead to the first collision which we hope to see in the coming weeks," she added.
Dr Shears is involved in the development of a particle detector known as LHCb. A University College Dublin group led by Dr Ronan McNulty is also involved in this detector, the only experimental physicists in Ireland involved in Cern research.
There are also a number of theoretical physics groups working with Cern and Trinity College Dublin is a major hub in Cern's Grid computer network, the system that will distribute billions of pages of data across the world for analysis, stated the head of the Grid research group at Trinity, Dr Brian Coghlan.
"This is a 20-year project, but this is the first day of full operations," he said yesterday. "It is an extremely important event."
Cern would profoundly change our view of the universe with its potential for important discoveries, said Cern director general Dr Robert Aymar. "The LHC is a discovery machine," he stated.
